Jon Leyne

Jon Leyne, who has died aged 55, was a BBC foreign correspondent noted in
recent years for his reports from conflict zones throughout the Middle East.

Jon LeynePhoto: AFP/GETTY

5:47PM BST 28 Jul 2013

In 2004 Leyne was appointed the Corporation’s correspondent in Jordan. He covered the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese paramilitary group Hizbollah and the influx into Jordan of Iraqi refugees, as well as the more general political and economic problems facing Jordan and the wider region.

While working in Iran during the 2009 elections there, he was given only 24 hours to leave the country after being accused by the authorities of “meddling” in the nation’s internal affairs. The day before there had been street protests in Tehran in which at least 10 people were said to have been killed.

The son of a solicitor, Jonathan Jeremy Caradoc Leyne was born on February 28 1958 and educated at Winchester and Exeter University, where he read History. He then went on to Oxford to take an MPhil on the subject of global terrorism. In 1985 he joined the BBC, and his early roles included a spell in Belfast during the Troubles, and commentating on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the rowing at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics .

From 1992 to 1994 Leyne was the BBC’s correspondent at the United Nations in New York. He was then posted to Europe and the Middle East before returning to the United States in 2001 as US State Department correspondent in Washington, DC. He was on his way to his office in the Pentagon when the building was attacked on 9/11. In Washington, Leyne covered the build-up to the Iraq war of 2003 and accompanied the US Secretary of State Colin Powell on many overseas trips.

More recently, Leyne had been a familiar figure on television screens as he reported on the Arab Spring. He covered the Libyan uprising against Col Muammar Gaddafi, being one of the first Western journalists into Benghazi, and was in Cairo to witness the Egyptian revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

He was still in Egypt in late 2012, reporting on the growing unrest under President Morsi, when he was forced to return to Britain to seek treatment for persistent severe headaches. An incurable brain tumour was diagnosed.

Leyne loved the BBC, and was always conscientious and hard-working. In his spare time he was a keen runner, rower and pianist. He was also accomplished on the bassoon, taking the instrument wherever he was in the world; while in Jordan he played bassoon with one of the country’s leading orchestras, performing in the Roman amphitheatre at Jerash.

Jon Leyne is survived by his wife, the award-winning broadcasting journalist Maire Devine, and two stepchildren.